Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
It was well North of 'the wall'...
Depdening on which wall you mean, and how PB-pedantic you are being, the obvious one is probably Tebay Services near Kendal, which is north of Hadrian's Wall, and is "well north" of it if you are walking, and normally rates as one of the best two services in the UK - the other being Gloucester.
The other obvious possibility is Cairn Lodge Services in Lanarkshire (A74M - so technically motorway), which is run by the same people, and probably services locally caught haggises for all I know.
There's also the Pink Floyd album (although that's a moveabe target and the northnermost 'The Wall' is likely quite far north. Or the old TV game show, but that depends on whether it's based on when it was filmed in Poland or at Wembley...
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
As Brexit and Farage are gradually traduced it can only be a matter of time before this one man band loses it's gloss. I also get the feeling that the zeitgeist is shifting. Maybe it's revulsion of Trump maybe Israel but something seems to be moving.
Among the friends of my son (21) and step-daugter (24), the choice appears to be almost exclusively between Green and Reform. The traditional parties barely seem to get a look in.
An example of the continuing polarision among those who have grown up online.
Did everyone see that car crash Sky interview where the interviewer laughed at him.
Only a true idiot could be skewered like that, and instead of getting out of it with a mealy mouthed acknowledgement, decide to grind himself further on to the stake with dogged determination.
Apologies for using the Tory Party short, but you really don't want to see the full thing anyway.
I guess Ed Miliband doubled down because he's basically correct. This is a tax on profits, not on prices which are set internationally. It's highly disingenuous of the Conservatives to castigate Ed Miliband for a levy that they put in place.
But if you are looking at a certain return on your investment then you look at that net of the tax. If you are aiming for 20% but 78% of your profit is being nicked in tax then you need to charge higher prices to achieve that 20%. The slightly scary thing about that interview is that I think Miliband was simply not getting that, that he will not accept that there are consequences of his actions.
Just like when we had the windfall taxes and then lamented the lack of new investment. Who'd have thought?
You can't charge a higher price in the oil market, it's one of the few examples of a perfect market, producers are price-takers unless they band together like OPEC but even then they are shifting the market price not achieving individual price differentiation. If the cost (in this case tax) is higher in one country where they produce then they make a lower profit on oil production in that country and that will influence their decisions on investment etc but it will make no difference to the market price of oil.
Milliband does get the economics of the energy market and he is trying to use those to achieve his aims. People don't necessarily like those aims, particularly oil executives with a personal bonus incentive, and they have money to lobby against them but Milliband doesn't want new oil & gas in the North Sea, he wants the energy companies to switch to renewable energy production.
Let me try and give a worked example. If you are a supermarket and you want to sell petrol then obviously your base cost is fixed by the price of petrol in the international market, I am not disputing that. Let's say you want to buy £1m of fuel. That is what you pay. But that is only 1 element of the charge made to the public. They also have their distribution and servicing costs. Let's say that they amount to 20%. That means your cost in providing that £1m of fuel is £1.2m. Let's say you want to make a gross 20% return on that fuel. You would then be looking to charge £1.44m to get your gross profit.
But if you are looking at your net profit after tax you have to compare the profit on selling fuel with the cost of selling washing powder. On the washing powder you pay 25% tax on your gross profit. On the fuel you pay 78%. So, to make the same net profit you need to make roughly 3x the gross profit that you do on the washing powder. So you charge your customers more.
Of course if for whatever reason the supermarket was selling on the international wholesale market they wouldn't get away with that. The market simply would not pay the higher premium. But Joe Public in the domestic market does not have that option. So they pay more to each of the suppliers available in their area, all of whom have the same problem. So the level of taxation does affect the price that the consumer pays.
It’s not the margins, it’s the IRR or velocity. Which is why shovelling money at the boomers who save it is the completely wrong policy. Give it to the poor and families who will spend it. Spending being the main component part of GDP.
This is an utter disgrace and Israel should be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest and banned for at least 40 years.
Eurovision to change voting rules after claims of Israeli government 'interference'
The reduction in the number of votes that can be made online, or via SMS or phone call, from 20 to 10 was "designed to encourage more balanced participation", said contest director Martin Green.
The Eurovision Song Contest is changing its voting system, following allegations of "interference" by Israel's government this year.
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of votes from the public in the contest in May, ultimately finishing as runner-up after the jury votes were counted.
But a number of broadcasters raised concerns about Israel's result.
After the final, Irish broadcaster RTE requested a breakdown in voting numbers from contest organiser the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), while Spain's public broadcaster, Radio Television Espanola (RTVE), called for a "complete review" of the voting system to avoid "external interference".
In September, Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS said it could no longer justify Israel's participation in the contest, due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
It went on to say there had been "proven interference by the Israeli government during the last edition of the Song Contest, with the event being used as a political instrument". The statement did not elaborate on the means of "interference".
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
It was well North of 'the wall'...
Depdening on which wall you mean, and how PB-pedantic you are being, the obvious one is probably Tebay Services near Kendal, which is north of Hadrian's Wall, and is "well north" of it if you are walking, and normally rates as one of the best two services in the UK - the other being Gloucester.
The other obvious possibility is Cairn Lodge Services in Lanarkshire (A74M - so technically motorway), which is run by the same people, and probably services locally caught haggises for all I know.
Tebay is not north of Hadrian's Wall. On the west coast, it runs to Gretna (well, Bowness on Solway, but that's on the southern edge of the firth's coast).
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
Thanks, these are all good points. On integration, I can only really go off what I see around me. I'd guess my kids' school is <50% 'white British' but they all speak English and get on with each other. I work in a business set up by immigrants where Brits are in a minority. My own family has Sri Lankans, Indians and French in it. Many of my friends and neghbours are immigrants. It all seems to be working pretty well. Of course I know there are parts of the country where people are less integrated and there are more tensions. I think that ultimately things will work out because it is in our self interest for that to happen. Is immigration a sticking plaster? Maybe. I'd put it differently - I'd say that the economy tends towards a certain ratio of people working to not working and so an economy with lots of old people who demand goods and services but don't supply labour will naturally create incentives to raise the labour supply. I don't worry so much about immigrants' dependents because these are mostly kids, who are a resource not a cost. I think there's nothing wrong with population growth as long as we invest in housing and infrastructure. Indeed I think it's good to have more people as it makes us a bigger and stronger economy.
"A Brighton library, it reports, was due to host an “anti-racist” exhibition, featuring a “reimagined” Union flag made by a mixed-race son of immigrants. The flag is covered in images of small boats, and was made using “textiles from the UK’s diverse communities”. The council, however, has now decided to cancel it. Why? Believe it or not, it’s because it could have “inadvertently upset minority groups”."
They probably forgot to add actual immigrants/minorities to the decision about whether it was offensive or not.
In my experience, people from minorities are more worried about actual racism, rather than "If you shut one eye, and twist your head just so, in bad light, someone might (or might not) think that was slightly not wonderful."
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
It was well North of 'the wall'...
Depdening on which wall you mean, and how PB-pedantic you are being, the obvious one is probably Tebay Services near Kendal, which is north of Hadrian's Wall, and is "well north" of it if you are walking, and normally rates as one of the best two services in the UK - the other being Gloucester.
The other obvious possibility is Cairn Lodge Services in Lanarkshire (A74M - so technically motorway), which is run by the same people, and probably services locally caught haggises for all I know.
Tebay is not north of Hadrian's Wall. On the west coast, it runs to Gretna (well, Bowness on Solway, but that's on the southern edge of the firth's coast).
The line of the wall runs well south of Gretna, through north Carlisle.
(Walking the wall this year has been popular with Americans; I have met loads. They all begin either by apologising in advance for their POTUS or explaining they are Canadian. They are uniformly charming).
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
As Brexit and Farage are gradually traduced it can only be a matter of time before this one man band loses it's gloss. I also get the feeling that the zeitgeist is shifting. Maybe it's revulsion of Trump maybe Israel but something seems to be moving.
Among the friends of my son (21) and step-daugter (24), the choice appears to be almost exclusively between Green and Reform. The traditional parties barely seem to get a look in.
That's pretty depressing, and bears out the time-honoured political dictum: "Things can always get worse."
The biggest bias of the BBC (and I am a lifelong fan) is that it tries to convince us that news and current affairs is boring and uninteresting full of unchallenged and unchallenging vague human interest.
The current obsession with the abject poverty of the £60,000K + brigade is also odd.
Lets acknowledge their position in society has changed.
In the 1980s their bosses might earn 2x the £60k equivalent and they might earn 3x more than the entry level jobs.
Nowadays their bosses can earn 4x and they are earning 2x the entry level jobs. They are not poor or hard done by, but worse off than they would expect based on watching previous generations lifestyles.
It also comes back to the housing theory of everything.
Earning £60k is great if you have no housing costs and lower tax rates (eg no NI on that).
Earning £60k when you need to pay taxes and housing and potentially 9% student loans etc does not leave anywhere near as much left over.
Earning £60k is great if your other half is also on £60k.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
It was well North of 'the wall'...
Depdening on which wall you mean, and how PB-pedantic you are being, the obvious one is probably Tebay Services near Kendal, which is north of Hadrian's Wall, and is "well north" of it if you are walking, and normally rates as one of the best two services in the UK - the other being Gloucester.
The other obvious possibility is Cairn Lodge Services in Lanarkshire (A74M - so technically motorway), which is run by the same people, and probably services locally caught haggises for all I know.
Tebay is not north of Hadrian's Wall. On the west coast, it runs to Gretna (well, Bowness on Solway, but that's on the southern edge of the firth's coast).
The line of the wall runs well south of Gretna, through north Carlisle.
(Walking the wall this year has been popular with Americans; I have met loads. They all begin either by apologising in advance for their POTUS or explaining they are Canadian. They are uniformly charming).
I don't know the wall in that area (obviously!) and I wrongly thought it ran to the mouth of the firth before following the southern bank. But Carlisle's still far north of Tebay.
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
As Brexit and Farage are gradually traduced it can only be a matter of time before this one man band loses it's gloss. I also get the feeling that the zeitgeist is shifting. Maybe it's revulsion of Trump maybe Israel but something seems to be moving.
Among the friends of my son (21) and step-daugter (24), the choice appears to be almost exclusively between Green and Reform. The traditional parties barely seem to get a look in.
An example of the continuing polarision among those who have grown up online.
I was born in 1981, when GDP/capita of the UK was around $20,000 in 2011 US dollars. By the time I was 24, it had risen to $35,000, a 75% increase. Yay for me!
If you were born in 1998, GDP/capita was $30,000. By 2022 it was... $38,000, a shade over 25% higher. Young people today have grown up in the worst economic conditions since the great depression! The shock isn't that outsider parties are doing well, but that it has taken this long for them to start doing so.
If you went back in time to 2005 or so and the only thing you could show people was a graph of the future path of GDP, people would definitely have predicted major political upheavals, with no need to cite the internet or social media as a cause. If anything, the hard thing to explain is how we managed to absorb this without even greater upheaval. Possibly this is because the major political project of the West over the last century has been "how do we make sure the things that happened after the great depression don't happen again".
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
As Brexit and Farage are gradually traduced it can only be a matter of time before this one man band loses it's gloss. I also get the feeling that the zeitgeist is shifting. Maybe it's revulsion of Trump maybe Israel but something seems to be moving.
Among the friends of my son (21) and step-daugter (24), the choice appears to be almost exclusively between Green and Reform. The traditional parties barely seem to get a look in.
An example of the continuing polarision among those who have grown up online.
I was born in 1981, when GDP/capita of the UK was around $20,000 in 2011 US dollars. By the time I was 24, it had risen to $35,000, a 75% increase. Yay for me!
If you were born in 1998, GDP/capita was $30,000. By 2022 it was... $38,000, a shade over 25% higher. Young people today have grown up in the worst economic conditions since the great depression! The shock isn't that outsider parties are doing well, but that it has taken this long for them to start doing so.
If you went back in time to 2005 or so and the only thing you could show people was a graph of the future path of GDP, people would definitely have predicted major political upheavals, with no need to cite the internet or social media as a cause. If anything, the hard thing to explain is how we managed to absorb this without even greater upheaval. Possibly this is because the major political project of the West over the last century has been "how do we make sure the things that happened after the great depression don't happen again".
Have you allowed for inflation? That would actually make things worse.
This has appeared on Wiki but I haven't seen any official announcement by YouGov yet.
Lowest Reform share at 25% since Techne Poll last April I think.
As Brexit and Farage are gradually traduced it can only be a matter of time before this one man band loses it's gloss. I also get the feeling that the zeitgeist is shifting. Maybe it's revulsion of Trump maybe Israel but something seems to be moving.
Among the friends of my son (21) and step-daugter (24), the choice appears to be almost exclusively between Green and Reform. The traditional parties barely seem to get a look in.
A choice between an economically illiterate fantasy land and an economically illiterate fantasy land with an undertow of racism and despotism.
Pretty much. It's a no-brainer choice for me if it were to come down to the binary but I'd prefer that it didn't.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
It was well North of 'the wall'...
Depdening on which wall you mean, and how PB-pedantic you are being, the obvious one is probably Tebay Services near Kendal, which is north of Hadrian's Wall, and is "well north" of it if you are walking, and normally rates as one of the best two services in the UK - the other being Gloucester.
The other obvious possibility is Cairn Lodge Services in Lanarkshire (A74M - so technically motorway), which is run by the same people, and probably services locally caught haggises for all I know.
For the avoidance of doubt, Tebay services is well south of Hadrian's Wall. Like, nearly 50 miles. But like Hadrian's Wall, Tebay Services is a day out in itself.
I'd be surprised if it is, as it's got standard sleepers and the 7ft gauge was carried on longitudinal baulks of timber with cross-ties to keep them in gauge.
Must have been fun with re-gauging and mixed gauge track. Makes it more impressive that the Great Western Mainline was reguaged over just one weekend in 1892.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
I think there's a lot for the media to mine from Farage's time in the European Parliament and his participation with the various AltRight groups in the US, and elsewhere.
He is, if you take a slightly historical perspective, a profoundly non-British type of politician. Much more at home in the US, or with the continental European right, than with UK conservatism. Which is not to say that he doesn't have a good sense of what makes voters tick, or how to present himself.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
It was well North of 'the wall'...
Depdening on which wall you mean, and how PB-pedantic you are being, the obvious one is probably Tebay Services near Kendal, which is north of Hadrian's Wall, and is "well north" of it if you are walking, and normally rates as one of the best two services in the UK - the other being Gloucester.
The other obvious possibility is Cairn Lodge Services in Lanarkshire (A74M - so technically motorway), which is run by the same people, and probably services locally caught haggises for all I know.
Tebay is not north of Hadrian's Wall. On the west coast, it runs to Gretna (well, Bowness on Solway, but that's on the southern edge of the firth's coast).
The line of the wall runs well south of Gretna, through north Carlisle.
(Walking the wall this year has been popular with Americans; I have met loads. They all begin either by apologising in advance for their POTUS or explaining they are Canadian. They are uniformly charming).
I don't know the wall in that area (obviously!) and I wrongly thought it ran to the mouth of the firth before following the southern bank. But Carlisle's still far north of Tebay.
In reply to OLB - because for some reason I don't seem to be able to reply using the quote button:
Thanks. I'm genuinely pleased you see so many examples of integration working. FWIW, I do see plenty of examples where recent immigrants integrate well: my daughter's football team is 50% non-white-British, including three who have arrived from HK within the past few years with relatively little English - and both kids and parents are very keen to integrate. And the local cricket club is disproportionately Asian, and seems the first port of call for new Indian immigrants looking to find a place in their new community. All my daughters' schools are 30%-70% non-white-British: integration happens to some extent, though there are clearly some who are allowed very little freedom to associate with others outside of school. And at my youngest's school they have gone from less than 5% who do not have English as a first language to well over 40% in the last ten years, which has obviously caused challenges. I'm lucky enough to be in a nice middle class suburb however. In other areas of Greater Manchester, the incoming culture has been of such a large scale that integration is a lot weaker. And you clearly see this elsewhere in the country with the election of MPs and councillors on an explicitly Islamic ticket. So a mixed picture overall. But I'm very happy to celebrate integration when it happens.
Good morning, all. I return from a trip to the frozen North with anecdata.
I stopped at the motorway services, which has been revamped to include electric car charging points from various vendors.
There are 14 dedicated Tesla charging bays, and 12 others.
Of the 12 others, 7 were occupied.
Of the 14 Tesla bays, exactly none were occupied...
At the hotel, one of the dining rooms is designated The Library, and does indeed feature bookshelves stacked with real books, including a copy of The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
It appeared unread.
Define 'North'. Can't have been the real north if they had leccy and books! Luxury!
It was well North of 'the wall'...
Depdening on which wall you mean, and how PB-pedantic you are being, the obvious one is probably Tebay Services near Kendal, which is north of Hadrian's Wall, and is "well north" of it if you are walking, and normally rates as one of the best two services in the UK - the other being Gloucester.
The other obvious possibility is Cairn Lodge Services in Lanarkshire (A74M - so technically motorway), which is run by the same people, and probably services locally caught haggises for all I know.
Tebay is not north of Hadrian's Wall. On the west coast, it runs to Gretna (well, Bowness on Solway, but that's on the southern edge of the firth's coast).
The line of the wall runs well south of Gretna, through north Carlisle.
(Walking the wall this year has been popular with Americans; I have met loads. They all begin either by apologising in advance for their POTUS or explaining they are Canadian. They are uniformly charming).
I don't know the wall in that area (obviously!) and I wrongly thought it ran to the mouth of the firth before following the southern bank. But Carlisle's still far north of Tebay.
Not even in the same county (any more).
Unlike the southern parts, it wasn't thrown into the Furness.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
Most successful economies benefit greatly from immigration, and cultural mixing tends to be good for innovation.
The real discussion ought (IMO) to be over the practical limits in terms of numbers.
600k in a single year clearly produced serious strains, and was well beyond what the majority of the electorate would tolerate. But there's no real consensus around what an 'acceptable' level might be - even if you were to exclude the views of the purely xenophobic.
But that is very much a head in the clouds, philospohical, conversation, like talking about whether an acceptable fuel consumption for an ICE vehicle is 400mpg or 1000mpg. The Conservatives were maundering on about "10s of thousands" for more than a decade, whilst doing little practival and achieving even less.
So we end up with more and more extreme Planet Zarg rhetoric from the likes of Farage and Kemi and Jenrick trying to out-nutter Nigel (which is very difficult) creating straw men, the practicalities are not addressed at all, and they end up wanting to throw out the values which have given us 80 years are relative peace and stability.
Practically, we had net migration of 0 plus or minus tens of thousands (sometimes positive, sometimes negative) for almost all of those 80 years. Its only from the late 90s onwards that's not been the case.
Yes - generally I agree. However, we start from here !
Personally I think politically the outcome will be determined by a combination of how quickly and effectively (including possibly not at all) the measures from the current Government have an impact, and how quickly and effectively that feeds through to general consciousness (including those groups that will be saying "nothing has happened" even if something has happened).
To my eye we need clear and obvious 'improvements in numbers' by the year ending December 26 at the latest, when we will get the numbers through sometime during 2027. Technically it could be one year later, but I think that it needs 12-18 months to start having an impact on popular consciousness and then needs another year to reinforce the impression.
I'd be surprised if it is, as it's got standard sleepers and the 7ft gauge was carried on longitudinal baulks of timber with cross-ties to keep them in gauge.
Must have been fun with re-gauging and mixed gauge track. Makes it more impressive that the Great Western Mainline was reguaged over just one weekend in 1892.
Can imagine the fun that would create now?
On the sleepers - never found any details on how they actually changed over.
My guess was that they pre laid new longitudinal to carry the narrower guage rail. And probably laid the rail as well.
The changeover would have been points etc.
Then a vast clean operation to change to standard sleepers - must have taken years.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
I've an acquaintance who marks English papers for a British university with (I think) an on line facility. The papers from American students show, he says, far less grasp of the material than students from elsewhere.
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky D is father to the man, and most up think he He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Yes, he's bound to have become more sophisticated since then.
Although the child is father to the man, and let's face it, the accusations stick because they are probably true, the fact of the Russian kompromat is far more dangerous. The petition for an inquiry is growing quite fast.
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Quite - the level of derangement is hilarious. Because of course all other politicians were saintly youngsters.
The problem is, less that he was a twat when he was young. Lots of people are. The issue is there's reason to think he's just as much of a twat now he's old.
I'd be surprised if it is, as it's got standard sleepers and the 7ft gauge was carried on longitudinal baulks of timber with cross-ties to keep them in gauge.
Must have been fun with re-gauging and mixed gauge track. Makes it more impressive that the Great Western Mainline was reguaged over just one weekend in 1892.
Can imagine the fun that would create now?
On the sleepers - never found any details on how they actually changed over.
My guess was that they pre laid new longitudinal to carry the narrower guage rail. And probably laid the rail as well.
The changeover would have been points etc.
Then a vast clean operation to change to standard sleepers - must have taken years.
I wonder if the test associated with Roger's initial post was 'can I get people involved in a discussion of arcane railwayana with just one photograph?' If so, test successful!
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Quite - the level of derangement is hilarious. Because of course all other politicians were saintly youngsters.
Other politicians are not being accused of going around singing the Horst Wessel song as a teenager.
Farage’s could have owned & apologised for his teenage edgelordism at any time over the previous decades, but chose not to. Now he’s finally having his feet held to the fire over his history & is finding it uncomfortable.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
The item feels like a parody. Quite close to how Private Eye would depict the BBC at its most bland. 'How can I make it to Glyndebourne on £150K without my Motability Jaguar?'
Jaguar are not in Motability .
I don't think they ever have been (open to correction, as I'm not 100% sure).
So under Labour the BBC publishes this nonsense - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyx9n5p7v7o - "Has Britain's budget watchdog become too all-powerful?", it's almost as though the lefties in the BBC have an agenda to support the Labour party.
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Quite - the level of derangement is hilarious. Because of course all other politicians were saintly youngsters.
I think, but I really haven't bothered with it much, that many of the complaints were about his activity in the VIth Form. (Years 12 and 13 for younger readers.)
But you're right; I wouldn't like to be held to account for some of my juvenile views.
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Yes, he's bound to have become more sophisticated since then.
According to his biographer, Crick, Dulwich College were so concerned at his attitudes that they declined to make him a prefect when he was in the sixth form there. You are nevertheless correct about his increased sophistication. He has evidently learned to smoke and drink since.
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
The item feels like a parody. Quite close to how Private Eye would depict the BBC at its most bland. 'How can I make it to Glyndebourne on £150K without my Motability Jaguar?'
Jaguar are not in Motability .
I don't think they ever have been (open to correction, as I'm not 100% sure).
Jaguar aren't even making cars at the moment (and possibly never again, the way they're carrying on).
My sister's Motability car is a Peugeot Expert. Hardly a luxury vehicle, apart from its capacious size. It was affordable on the upfront cost but is a bastard to maintain and insure.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
That's a fascinating, and persuasive, and depressing, read. Recommended.
This is one of the conclusions: "We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society."
OT - Ah Ed Milliband - the British equivalent of Kamala! Having said that he may well be Lab's best bet unless someone fresh emerges. The current 'front-runners' are alike in their mediocrity and/or futility
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Yes, he's bound to have become more sophisticated since then.
According to his biographer, Crick, Dulwich College were so concerned at his attitudes that they declined to make him a prefect when he was in the sixth form there. You are nevertheless correct about his increased sophistication. He has evidently learned to smoke and drink since.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Yes, he's bound to have become more sophisticated since then.
According to his biographer, Crick, Dulwich College were so concerned at his attitudes that they declined to make him a prefect when he was in the sixth form there. You are nevertheless correct about his increased sophistication. He has evidently learned to smoke and drink since.
He probably smoked while there. Clandestinely!
And drank, if he was anything like most sixth formers.
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Yes, he's bound to have become more sophisticated since then.
According to his biographer, Crick, Dulwich College were so concerned at his attitudes that they declined to make him a prefect when he was in the sixth form there. You are nevertheless correct about his increased sophistication. He has evidently learned to smoke and drink since.
He probably smoked while there. Clandestinely!
And drank, if he was anything like most sixth formers.
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
Minis are still included.
I wonder what the criteria was - hopefully it was something simple like the brand must have some cars available without an upfront fee.
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Yes, he's bound to have become more sophisticated since then.
According to his biographer, Crick, Dulwich College were so concerned at his attitudes that they declined to make him a prefect when he was in the sixth form there. You are nevertheless correct about his increased sophistication. He has evidently learned to smoke and drink since.
He probably smoked while there. Clandestinely!
I remember canoeing under the border bridge at Berwick when I was 14 and smoking, only for my father to appear on the river bank
I have never off loaded a cigarette quicker !!!!
I stopped smoking over 20 years ago but wish I had never started
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Quite - the level of derangement is hilarious. Because of course all other politicians were saintly youngsters.
The problem is, less that he was a twat when he was young. Lots of people are. The issue is there's reason to think he's just as much of a twat now he's old.
The problem seems to be more the number of people who develop into twats as they get older.
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
Nice of them to admit the scheme persists because it props up automakers. Not sure the Britain-First bit is legal though...
So under Labour the BBC publishes this nonsense - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyx9n5p7v7o - "Has Britain's budget watchdog become too all-powerful?", it's almost as though the lefties in the BBC have an agenda to support the Labour party.
What rubbish. The government sets the rules in which the OBR works to and has complete freedom to change, scrap or ignore them if it wants to.
However, as Truss found, that is not a free lunch and the government should expect to pay higher borrowing costs as a result.
I feel like the OBR is the only thing stopping this country having a fiscal trajectory as bad as France or the US.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
I guess one note of context: at US universities students tend to take a range of classes across different subjects and so students taking an English literature class are going to be a much broader range of students, majoring in many different subjects, compared to students at a British university who would generally all be studying only English literature. Having said that, Bleak House shouldn't be that hard to read for anyone. My kids' secondary puts a lot of emphasis on reading for pleasure and has also banned mobile phones, both very positive developments!
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
This is an utter disgrace and Israel should be thrown out of the Eurovision song contest and banned for at least 40 years.
Eurovision to change voting rules after claims of Israeli government 'interference'
The reduction in the number of votes that can be made online, or via SMS or phone call, from 20 to 10 was "designed to encourage more balanced participation", said contest director Martin Green.
The Eurovision Song Contest is changing its voting system, following allegations of "interference" by Israel's government this year.
Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of votes from the public in the contest in May, ultimately finishing as runner-up after the jury votes were counted.
But a number of broadcasters raised concerns about Israel's result.
After the final, Irish broadcaster RTE requested a breakdown in voting numbers from contest organiser the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), while Spain's public broadcaster, Radio Television Espanola (RTVE), called for a "complete review" of the voting system to avoid "external interference".
In September, Dutch public broadcaster AVROTROS said it could no longer justify Israel's participation in the contest, due to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
It went on to say there had been "proven interference by the Israeli government during the last edition of the Song Contest, with the event being used as a political instrument". The statement did not elaborate on the means of "interference".
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
Professional Eurovision punters take diaspora communities into consideration. Even whether juries will vote to counteract a presumed diaspora televote.
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
Althing made by BMW it is branded Mini.
I don’t doubt it will be in.
Well you could go and look on the mobility website - where Mini isn’t a grayed out option (BMW,Lexus,Mercedes are grayed out)
So under Labour the BBC publishes this nonsense - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyx9n5p7v7o - "Has Britain's budget watchdog become too all-powerful?", it's almost as though the lefties in the BBC have an agenda to support the Labour party.
Funny you say that. We are getting articles like this on the Beebs site daily.
Two child benefit cap. It’s rather repetitive from them.
Imagine what it would have been like if Ed had won in 2015 with his coalition of chaos.
Thank heaven we dodged that bullet!
Ed Miliband was rightly rejected in 2015. His government would have been a car-crash.
And it wouldn't have made the political problem of EU membership or free movement "go away" either; it would have got worse.
We’d be in a happier place if we still had all those keen young European workers rather than the Boriswave that the Tories gifted us.
All the restaurants and pubs in my locality are now filled with young Britons working there.
I'd say that was a positive thing.
I'd say our economy being 6% or so larger than it is today would have been a more positive one.
And that's why you lost.
People didn't want a nominally larger economy for no change in GDP per head with all the social and cultural change that came with it.
You liked the social and cultural change, because values, yet still think raw GDP is an effective stick to beat those who disagree with you.
You've learned nothing.
Much of the public didn’t like the social and cultural change that the Brexiteers delivered subsequently with the large increase in migration, which suggests that the winners learnt nothing too.
I also think this argument that people on the left actively desire higher immigration for 'cultural' reasons is generally incorrect. Speaking for myself at least and other vaguely left wing people of my acquaintance I think our attitudes are subtly different to that. The point is that we can see that immigration is a natural byproduct of an economy with a lopsided age distribution and a world where it is cheaper and easier for people to relocate, and we don't actively dislike immigration because we tend to believe that integration happens in an organic way and we are not attracted to ethnic versions of nationhood. Perhaps this is an unimportant distinction for those who oppose immigration, but I think it might be useful for them to understand our views better. To put it more succinctly, it's not that we like immigration, more that we don't mind it.
This is a good and interesting post. A few points - and I speak only for myself here, not for everyone wary of immigration:
I'm not attracted to an ethnic version of nationhood - I know Asian Brits who are more culturally British than I am - but I am attracted to a cultural one: one where we share a common view of being British, where we speak the same language, hold the same small-l liberal, secular views, consent to be governed in the same way. In some way of course this is a fantasy - there will always be disagreement, and the freedom to disagree is healthy. But my view is that this common view has got substantially weaker over my lifetime.
I think it's interesting that you say integration happens in an organic way. My view is that it would be desirable if it did, but that it does not always appear to do so, and nor can it be forced. If it did, I think I would be largely on board with your point of view. But I don't think we can know which of us is right - at least not for another couple of generations. You're clearly an intelligent man though (and I hope I could say the same about myself) and I like it on occasions like this when we identify the differing assumptions which lead different rational people to contrasting points of view.
On economics: I take your point about the demographic drivers for it, but I worry that importing more people is at best a sticking plaster; at worst counter-productive (depending on the economic value of those people we import and their dependents). If our economic model can only work with an ever growing population, we need a new economic model.
Most successful economies benefit greatly from immigration, and cultural mixing tends to be good for innovation.
The real discussion ought (IMO) to be over the practical limits in terms of numbers.
600k in a single year clearly produced serious strains, and was well beyond what the majority of the electorate would tolerate. But there's no real consensus around what an 'acceptable' level might be - even if you were to exclude the views of the purely xenophobic.
But that is very much a head in the clouds, philospohical, conversation, like talking about whether an acceptable fuel consumption for an ICE vehicle is 400mpg or 1000mpg. The Conservatives were maundering on about "10s of thousands" for more than a decade, whilst doing little practival and achieving even less.
So we end up with more and more extreme Planet Zarg rhetoric from the likes of Farage and Kemi and Jenrick trying to out-nutter Nigel (which is very difficult) creating straw men, the practicalities are not addressed at all, and they end up wanting to throw out the values which have given us 80 years are relative peace and stability.
I don't think it entirely head in the clouds, as it is also about practicalities. And the reality is that (for example) 100k net immigration per annum is likely to really bother only the nutters; it would not be a salient political issue.
So under Labour the BBC publishes this nonsense - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyx9n5p7v7o - "Has Britain's budget watchdog become too all-powerful?", it's almost as though the lefties in the BBC have an agenda to support the Labour party.
Funny you say that. We are getting articles like this on the Beebs site daily.
Two child benefit cap. It’s rather repetitive from them.
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
Althing made by BMW it is branded Mini.
I don’t doubt it will be in.
Well you could go and look on the mobility website - where Mini isn’t a grayed out option (BMW,Lexus,Mercedes are grayed out)
Well I didn’t know the change was already implemented and no need to be so snippy either 🙄
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
I guess one note of context: at US universities students tend to take a range of classes across different subjects and so students taking an English literature class are going to be a much broader range of students, majoring in many different subjects, compared to students at a British university who would generally all be studying only English literature. Having said that, Bleak House shouldn't be that hard to read for anyone. My kids' secondary puts a lot of emphasis on reading for pleasure and has also banned mobile phones, both very positive developments!
My experience of going straight into year three of an American University undergraduate programme was that, even then there was so much diluted extra classes that it was barely A Level standard. But that was a few decades ago.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Lovely to read that extract.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
Nice of them to admit the scheme persists because it props up automakers. Not sure the Britain-First bit is legal though...
What law would prioritising British built cars break?
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Lovely to read that extract.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
Sounds wonderful, Burges - definitely the best of times.
So under Labour the BBC publishes this nonsense - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyx9n5p7v7o - "Has Britain's budget watchdog become too all-powerful?", it's almost as though the lefties in the BBC have an agenda to support the Labour party.
What rubbish. The government sets the rules in which the OBR works to and has complete freedom to change, scrap or ignore them if it wants to.
However, as Truss found, that is not a free lunch and the government should expect to pay higher borrowing costs as a result.
I feel like the OBR is the only thing stopping this country having a fiscal trajectory as bad as France or the US.
It is a significant restriction on the CoE though, the unelected head of the OBR having a significant influence on the CoE's policy making. It may be net positive but it is giving significant power to an unelected and effectively unaccountable group.
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
Nice of them to admit the scheme persists because it props up automakers. Not sure the Britain-First bit is legal though...
What law would prioritising British built cars break?
I don't know! Couldn't it be argued it's effectively public procurement? Even if Motability is arms-length from the Government?
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
I guess one note of context: at US universities students tend to take a range of classes across different subjects and so students taking an English literature class are going to be a much broader range of students, majoring in many different subjects, compared to students at a British university who would generally all be studying only English literature. Having said that, Bleak House shouldn't be that hard to read for anyone. My kids' secondary puts a lot of emphasis on reading for pleasure and has also banned mobile phones, both very positive developments!
My experience of going straight into year three of an American University undergraduate programme was that, even then there was so much diluted extra classes that it was barely A Level standard. But that was a few decades ago.
My experience from living in both societies is that Brits are on average smarter and better educated than Americans. But America is a much more successful country. As they say, go figure!
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
My own favorite is : 'It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him'
They shouldn't have been included in the first place
Why? I find it an odd view from a Conservative.
If you get a State Pension, due to no longer being able* to work, then are you required to only shop at Aldi and subsist on value beans and own brand bread? Or are you allowed to use your own money to top up your pension and shop at Waitrose for top cuts of steak and claret?
If the latter, why should someone with a disability and mobility needs** who qualifies for disability benefits be limited to driving a budget car that is entirely covered by those benefits, rather than using their own money to top that up and get something fancier?
*the general assumption behind the state pension, rather than aimed at you specifically **this is the bigger issue - if there is one - that people are receiving benefits inappropriately, even if it's genuine disability but not one that incurs costs in this area
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
Nice of them to admit the scheme persists because it props up automakers. Not sure the Britain-First bit is legal though...
What law would prioritising British built cars break?
I don't know! Couldn't it be argued it's effectively public procurement? Even if Motability is arms-length from the Government?
There’s no law against prioritising U.K. content in public procurement.
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
Motability is one reason our used car market is cheaper than our peers'. Its 3-year renewal cycle means a flow of not very old used cars.
They shouldn't have been included in the first place
Why? I find it an odd view from a Conservative.
If you get a State Pension, due to no longer being able* to work, then are you required to only shop at Aldi and subsist on value beans and own brand bread? Or are you allowed to use your own money to top up your pension and shop at Waitrose for top cuts of steak and claret?
If the latter, why should someone with a disability and mobility needs** who qualifies for disability benefits be limited to driving a budget car that is entirely covered by those benefits, rather than using their own money to top that up and get something fancier?
*the general assumption behind the state pension, rather than aimed at you specifically **this is the bigger issue - if there is one - that people are receiving benefits inappropriately, even if it's genuine disability but not one that incurs costs in this area
If anyone wants to buy a luxury car with their own money then of course they should be able to do so.
What they shouldn't get is a grant to do so, and a tax exemption to do so.
If we want to make vehicles VAT free to help people get about then that should apply to absolutely everyone. Or absolutely everyone should be paying VAT and of course there should be more VAT (as it is a percentage) on luxury vehicles.
Giving people a tax break on VAT that is more than most working people's car costs outright is absurd.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
I guess one note of context: at US universities students tend to take a range of classes across different subjects and so students taking an English literature class are going to be a much broader range of students, majoring in many different subjects, compared to students at a British university who would generally all be studying only English literature. Having said that, Bleak House shouldn't be that hard to read for anyone. My kids' secondary puts a lot of emphasis on reading for pleasure and has also banned mobile phones, both very positive developments!
My experience of going straight into year three of an American University undergraduate programme was that, even then there was so much diluted extra classes that it was barely A Level standard. But that was a few decades ago.
It is postgrad that is American universities' secret sauce.
They shouldn't have been included in the first place
Why? I find it an odd view from a Conservative.
If you get a State Pension, due to no longer being able* to work, then are you required to only shop at Aldi and subsist on value beans and own brand bread? Or are you allowed to use your own money to top up your pension and shop at Waitrose for top cuts of steak and claret?
If the latter, why should someone with a disability and mobility needs** who qualifies for disability benefits be limited to driving a budget car that is entirely covered by those benefits, rather than using their own money to top that up and get something fancier?
*the general assumption behind the state pension, rather than aimed at you specifically **this is the bigger issue - if there is one - that people are receiving benefits inappropriately, even if it's genuine disability but not one that incurs costs in this area
If anyone wants to buy a luxury car with their own money then of course they should be able to do so.
What they shouldn't get is a grant to do so, and a tax exemption to do so.
If we want to make vehicles VAT free to help people get about then that should apply to absolutely everyone. Or absolutely everyone should be paying VAT and of course there should be more VAT (as it is a percentage) on luxury vehicles.
Giving people a tax break on VAT that is more than most working people's car costs outright is absurd.
The sane way of doing this is something like the way NHS spectacles work - there is support given to various groups to buy spectacles. You get an NHS voucher.
This is enough to buy a fair range of specs.
If you want Dolce & Gabbana - then you can use the voucher for that and top up the rest.
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
Motability is one reason our used car market is cheaper than our peers'. Its 3-year renewal cycle means a flow of not very old used cars.
By taking the taxes off people who are working, most of whom are getting to work in vehicles averaging about a decade old, in order to subsidise people getting new vehicles every 3 years.
That's not a great use of those taxes.
Taxes should be equally applied to all. Either everyone should pay VAT on new cars, or nobody should.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
More of a paragraph than just a line, but this is my other favourite:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
Just returned from Town and watched an interview with Farage on Sky
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
We're talking about roughly 50 years ago when he was about 14 years old.
Quite - the level of derangement is hilarious. Because of course all other politicians were saintly youngsters.
The problem is, less that he was a twat when he was young. Lots of people are. The issue is there's reason to think he's just as much of a twat now he's old.
No one is pretending that "all other politicians were saintly youngsters", or indeed that any of us were. Times and mores change, and we change with them - but it's not at all clear that Farage has changed in the slightest. He certainly seems very unwilling indeed to say that himself.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Lovely to read that extract.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
I don't read Dickens but I like the idea that some people still do. My parents got the full set hoping us kids would read them. Something I find slightly moving looking back. All part of them doing their best for us.
I’d only read two plays before. Macbeth, the night before my English literature O Level, when much that Mr Giles had been talking about for two years fell into place. What a story! I managed a C. For the same O Level I’d also read Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, which was compelling, particularly if you: a) Believed in the Devil b) Had sold your soul to him and could therefore relate to the protagonist. As it was, Faustus’ dilemma is a no-brainer for an adolescent. Twenty-four years of unparalleled pleasure in exchange for… it doesn’t matter what the exchange is, where do I sign?
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
Motability is one reason our used car market is cheaper than our peers'. Its 3-year renewal cycle means a flow of not very old used cars.
By taking the taxes off people who are working, most of whom are getting to work in vehicles averaging about a decade old, in order to subsidise people getting new vehicles every 3 years.
That's not a great use of those taxes.
Taxes should be equally applied to all. Either everyone should pay VAT on new cars, or nobody should.
Perhaps. Just don't blame me when you can't afford that 3-year-old BMW 5-series you've always promised yourself.
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
Though given our PB demographic, most of us as schoolboys were considerably closer in both culture and time to DIcken's London than is the average American youngster
"A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children. An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
To a surprisingly large group of people, seeing something they don’t know is a signal to switch off and put the book down. Rather than, say Google it.
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
Which is disappointing as something you don't know, or is deliberately wrong, can be an excellent way of setting the tone.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
Yes that is a great opener. So what's your other one?
More of a paragraph than just a line, but this is my other favourite:
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure".
Comments
I remember Max saying he and his family voted 60 times on repeat dial the year before. I doubt it has much to do with Israel directly. The Board of Deputies will get word out through their congregations that an Israeli singer needs help. "All you need do is phone this number until your fingers bleed....No...No...No..... don't worry you wont need to watch the programme........'
Is immigration a sticking plaster? Maybe. I'd put it differently - I'd say that the economy tends towards a certain ratio of people working to not working and so an economy with lots of old people who demand goods and services but don't supply labour will naturally create incentives to raise the labour supply. I don't worry so much about immigrants' dependents because these are mostly kids, who are a resource not a cost. I think there's nothing wrong with population growth as long as we invest in housing and infrastructure. Indeed I think it's good to have more people as it makes us a bigger and stronger economy.
In my experience, people from minorities are more worried about actual racism, rather than "If you shut one eye, and twist your head just so, in bad light, someone might (or might not) think that was slightly not wonderful."
testing
(Walking the wall this year has been popular with Americans; I have met loads. They all begin either by apologising in advance for their POTUS or explaining they are Canadian. They are uniformly charming).
+1 for train tracks
-10000 for no trains.
I was born in 1981, when GDP/capita of the UK was around $20,000 in 2011 US dollars. By the time I was 24, it had risen to $35,000, a 75% increase. Yay for me!
If you were born in 1998, GDP/capita was $30,000. By 2022 it was... $38,000, a shade over 25% higher. Young people today have grown up in the worst economic conditions since the great depression! The shock isn't that outsider parties are doing well, but that it has taken this long for them to start doing so.
If you went back in time to 2005 or so and the only thing you could show people was a graph of the future path of GDP, people would definitely have predicted major political upheavals, with no need to cite the internet or social media as a cause. If anything, the hard thing to explain is how we managed to absorb this without even greater upheaval. Possibly this is because the major political project of the West over the last century has been "how do we make sure the things that happened after the great depression don't happen again".
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/its-time-to-dispose-of-the-budget/
He was evasive and frankly wholly unconvincing in his denial over his alleged comments
It was not a good look for him but whether it registers with his voters time will tell
I really am praying the country will come to its senses and show Farage the door at sometime between now and the GE
I wish somebody would tell TSE's book to stop editing the site. It's a very mischievous book.
(Dog Man for scale.)
Must have been fun with re-gauging and mixed gauge track. Makes it more impressive that the Great Western Mainline was reguaged over just one weekend in 1892.
Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot."
https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1
I think there's a lot for the media to mine from Farage's time in the European Parliament and his participation with the various AltRight groups in the US, and elsewhere.
He is, if you take a slightly historical perspective, a profoundly non-British type of politician. Much more at home in the US, or with the continental European right, than with UK conservatism. Which is not to say that he doesn't have a good sense of what makes voters tick, or how to present himself.
Thanks. I'm genuinely pleased you see so many examples of integration working. FWIW, I do see plenty of examples where recent immigrants integrate well: my daughter's football team is 50% non-white-British, including three who have arrived from HK within the past few years with relatively little English - and both kids and parents are very keen to integrate. And the local cricket club is disproportionately Asian, and seems the first port of call for new Indian immigrants looking to find a place in their new community. All my daughters' schools are 30%-70% non-white-British: integration happens to some extent, though there are clearly some who are allowed very little freedom to associate with others outside of school. And at my youngest's school they have gone from less than 5% who do not have English as a first language to well over 40% in the last ten years, which has obviously caused challenges.
I'm lucky enough to be in a nice middle class suburb however. In other areas of Greater Manchester, the incoming culture has been of such a large scale that integration is a lot weaker. And you clearly see this elsewhere in the country with the election of MPs and councillors on an explicitly Islamic ticket.
So a mixed picture overall. But I'm very happy to celebrate integration when it happens.
Personally I think politically the outcome will be determined by a combination of how quickly and effectively (including possibly not at all) the measures from the current Government have an impact, and how quickly and effectively that feeds through to general consciousness (including those groups that will be saying "nothing has happened" even if something has happened).
To my eye we need clear and obvious 'improvements in numbers' by the year ending December 26 at the latest, when we will get the numbers through sometime during 2027. Technically it could be one year later, but I think that it needs 12-18 months to start having an impact on popular consciousness and then needs another year to reinforce the impression.
@SkyNews
Luxury cars removed from Motability scheme ahead of budget"
https://x.com/SkyNews/status/1993220705492541723
https://news.sky.com/story/luxury-cars-removed-from-motability-scheme-ahead-of-budget-13475029
On the sleepers - never found any details on how they actually changed over.
My guess was that they pre laid new longitudinal to carry the narrower guage rail. And probably laid the rail as well.
The changeover would have been points etc.
Then a vast clean operation to change to standard sleepers - must have taken years.
They will keep fading. The relentless attacks from the SKS/Kemi/Ed threesome is working.
The cosy little main party threesome will soon turn their attention to the Greens. In fact they’ve already started.
However Farage is a pussy in his responses. Zack is much more robust in taking the fight to them
Bluetooth enabled min/max temperature and humidity digital room thermometers, that you can read via a phone app. Three for £22.
I don't have these particular ones, but have used this type of device for ever for dozens of different applications.
The only downside in my experience is that they don't bounce.
Recommendation via Buildhub.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ThermoPro-Thermometer-Bluetooth-Hygrometer-Temperature/dp/B0BTSW9JGT
You 'ad a reliant Robin? Luxury! Why, we 'ad to make do with the 'ollowed out body of an Opel Kadett!
Farage’s could have owned & apologised for his teenage edgelordism at any time over the previous decades, but chose not to. Now he’s finally having his feet held to the fire over his history & is finding it uncomfortable.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Maybe the language feels a bit unusual, describing a place and society they're not familiar with. But doesn't seem difficult, something we would have read at school pre GCSE. But, of course a deeper understanding if read by an older group.
I don't think they ever have been (open to correction, as I'm not 100% sure).
But you're right; I wouldn't like to be held to account for some of my juvenile views.
Motability Operations, the charity which operates the scheme, says the aim is for 50% of vehicles leased to be built in Britain by 2035, claiming it will support UK economic growth with a demand for 150,000 vehicles every year.
However, luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes will be removed as options, alongside the likes of Audi, Lexus, and Alfa Romeo, "immediately".
An announcement from Motability said: "In the short term, Motability Operations will work closely with UK-based manufacturers to increase the share of British-built vehicles leased by customers, while maintaining affordability, choice and quality.
"This includes doubling the number of Nissan British-built vehicles that the scheme leases to around 40,000.
"The intention would be that 25% of cars on the scheme would be UK-built by 2030, up from 7% today."
(I wonder if BMW Minis will be in or out.)
My sister's Motability car is a Peugeot Expert. Hardly a luxury vehicle, apart from its capacious size. It was affordable on the upfront cost but is a bastard to maintain and insure.
This is one of the conclusions: "We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society."
He probably smoked while there. Clandestinely!
So you’ll lose people at Michaelmas, more at “ Lord Chancellor” - Americans will not have heard of that, on average. Then Megalosaurus….
I wonder what the criteria was - hopefully it was something simple like the brand must have some cars available without an upfront fee.
I have never off loaded a cigarette quicker !!!!
I stopped smoking over 20 years ago but wish I had never started
However, as Truss found, that is not a free lunch and the government should expect to pay higher borrowing costs as a result.
I feel like the OBR is the only thing stopping this country having a fiscal trajectory as bad as France or the US.
My kids' secondary puts a lot of emphasis on reading for pleasure and has also banned mobile phones, both very positive developments!
I don’t doubt it will be in.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/07/motability-firm-boss-to-get-22m-bonus-on-top-of-17m-salary
Two child benefit cap. It’s rather repetitive from them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxg6wlzrd5o
And the reality is that (for example) 100k net immigration per annum is likely to really bother only the nutters; it would not be a salient political issue.
Over the years I worked my way through all the Dickens novels, borrowing many from a solicitor friend who had been left a full set by a former client, finishing earlier this year with A Tale of Two Cities.
Hopefully will live long enough to repeat the trick. There really is nothing quite like a Dickens, particularly during a long winter evening.
One of my two favourite first sentences to a book is from 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
The clocks striking thirteen immediately sets the tone that something is unsettlingly different to our reality.
It may be net positive but it is giving significant power to an unelected and effectively unaccountable group.
If you get a State Pension, due to no longer being able* to work, then are you required to only shop at Aldi and subsist on value beans and own brand bread? Or are you allowed to use your own money to top up your pension and shop at Waitrose for top cuts of steak and claret?
If the latter, why should someone with a disability and mobility needs** who qualifies for disability benefits be limited to driving a budget car that is entirely covered by those benefits, rather than using their own money to top that up and get something fancier?
*the general assumption behind the state pension, rather than aimed at you specifically
**this is the bigger issue - if there is one - that people are receiving benefits inappropriately, even if it's genuine disability but not one that incurs costs in this area
Perhaps you are thinking of EU rules?
What they shouldn't get is a grant to do so, and a tax exemption to do so.
If we want to make vehicles VAT free to help people get about then that should apply to absolutely everyone. Or absolutely everyone should be paying VAT and of course there should be more VAT (as it is a percentage) on luxury vehicles.
Giving people a tax break on VAT that is more than most working people's car costs outright is absurd.
This is enough to buy a fair range of specs.
If you want Dolce & Gabbana - then you can use the voucher for that and top up the rest.
You don’t grants or VAT off the extra.
That's not a great use of those taxes.
Taxes should be equally applied to all. Either everyone should pay VAT on new cars, or nobody should.
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/24/nigel-farages-shifting-answers-on-school-days-racism-claims-a-timeline
No one is pretending that "all other politicians were saintly youngsters", or indeed that any of us were.
Times and mores change, and we change with them - but it's not at all clear that Farage has changed in the slightest. He certainly seems very unwilling indeed to say that himself.
I don't think that "hilarious derangement".
— Alan Davies describes his schooldays.